Ovens, such as commercial ovens used in restaurants or other establishments, are frequently employed to rapidly heat and brown certain foods. One of the more common examples of a food needing heating and browning is cheese.
Several different types of ovens have been used in the past to heat and brown food. For example, in order to meet peak demand requirements, a large deck oven is often employed because it can process a large quantity of food product at the same time. This type of oven usually implements convection cooking. Convection cooking, however, requires extended cooking times in order to brown and melt food products. Additionally, the space requirement for a typical deck oven is often prohibitive in many commercial kitchens, especially smaller satellite restaurants and kiosks where there is typically insufficient floor space to devote to large deck ovens.
Therefore, where space is at a premium, small infrared (IR) ovens are used. These IR ovens often require approximately 20 to 30 seconds to brown and heat certain foods (e.g., cheese). However, during peak and high volume demand periods, such cooking times are often unacceptable, particularly where a smaller oven processes less food at a time.
Another significant problem with deck ovens and IR ovens is that either they require preheating because of their high mass heating elements or they must be energized throughout the day in order to avoid the wasted time of preheating. If they are energized throughout the day, an additional load on environmental systems, such as air conditioners, is created.
In order to achieve faster melting times and at the same time avoid extended on-times, either microwave ovens or ovens using quartz resistive heating elements may be used. However, microwave ovens typically do not achieve the required browning, and ovens utilizing quartz resistive heating elements do not reach optimum power density for high speed melting/browning. Moreover, ovens using quartz halogen lamps are known, but such ovens are too large and costly to gain market acceptance.
The present invention is arranged to overcome one or more of the above-stated problems.